An imaginative and attractive programme of Czech songs from Czech mezzo Magdalena Kozená.

Miscellaneous /
BBC Music Magazine (London) / 01. December 2008

With her gleaming, tangy voice still in its first freshness, Kozená is a predictably ardent advocate of these songs, singing with an ideal balance of subtlety and earthy directness. She uses a bold, "open" tone in lusty numbers such as Dvorák's The Strings Are Tuned and Janácek's Musicians, and brings an unaffected simplicity to a clutch of charming mock-Elizabethan lute songs (here guitar-accompanied) by Petr Eben.Kozená combines delightfully with soprano Dorothea Röschmann in a pair of Dvorák's Moravian duets, one wild, the other insinuating, and relishes the Tchaikovskian romanticism of Novák's mini-cycle Fairytale of the Heart. Pianist Malcolm Martineau matches her all the way in colour and rhythmic guile.

. . . lucky daughter and wise mama! . . . It's fine music, magnificently performed by Kozená and Malcolm Martineau . . . Even the most hardened lover of Lieder will find music to surprise and delight here . . . the recording's eponymous 'Songs my mother taught me', is as seductive as ever, with Kozená bringing a very special innerness to her interpretation . . . the piano walks an elegant pace behind the voice, and what a voice Kozená produces, rich creamy tone in the lower register and a faultless legato . . . If she is in particularly fine voice here and Martineau on top form too, then so are their guests. Dorothea Röschmann joins Kozená for two of Dvorák's "Moravian Duets" and so well do the two voices fit together, hand in glove, that you can only hope that someone will record all these duets with these singers. Michael Freimuth plays an elegant guitar in Petr Eben's "Songs with Lute" . . . Kozená sings it as if her life depended on it.

Record Review /
Christopher Cook,
International Record Review (London) / 01. November 2008

Her smoothly phrased performance captures the nostalgia of this music, with which she is very much at home. Indeed, this feels like the finest recording she has made since her much earlier disc of Czech love songs and in many ways the repertory is complementary. Singing in a language she really did learn from her mother, Kozená sounds at her most relaxed . . . The mezzo opens with an unaccompanied folksong, and elsewhere benefits from the sympathetic partnership of Malcolm Martineau . . . there's a sense of something special about this recital. Kozená clearly cares deeply about this repertoire and she throws herself into it. The result is a privileged sense of keying into a rich culture indeed.

Here is a superbly well thought-out recital of Czech song from the late 18th century to near the later 20th. The diversity of style is huge with Dvorák, Janácek and Martinu rubbing shoulders with Novák, Rösler, Schulhoff and that most fascinating of late 20th-century Czech composers, Petr Eben, not to mention a dash of folksong by way of an opening flourish. It is a heady cocktail and superbly delivered. Magdalena Kozená is more than in command of every interpretative demand. There is a great deal of passion, not least in the well-known warhorse 'Songs my mother taught me' . . . every word is invested with meaning. The lute-accompanied Eben songs are real gems and bring out Kozená's remarkable range of tone. But, in truth, there is a huge amount to admire everywhere. A beautifully recorded conspectus of Czech song, with a Moravian twist.

With her dazzling looks, Magdalena Kozená is surely one of the most glamorous women on the operatic stage. That's even before she opens her mouth. And when she does -- well, you can't argue with that voice . . . [Kozená] has got everything . . . seems as warm as her voice, relaxed and ready to laugh. Those high spirits illuminate much of the repertoire she's bringing to the Barbican, which also features in her new album: Czech songs from Dvorák and Janácek to Petr Eben, entitled "Songs My Mother Taught Me". The music also contains a gentle but deep vein of pathos.

With her beautiful voice complemented by good looks, Kozená has become a superstar. Her mezzo has an instrumental quality, a bronze ring, and she produces consistently gorgeous sound. She is also a very fine singer . . . That she is singing in her native language is a big plus . . . This recital is lovely . . . A major strength of this recital is its variety of material . . .

Songs Her Mother Taught Her

Magdalena Kožená says that the title of this new disc is not fanciful. There are indeed songs here that her mother sang to her as a child and which she heard in village festivals from musicians who kept alive the traditions of Czech and Moravian folk poetry and song: “Especially the Janáček. These are songs he arranged in a very particular way, and they are just the sort a mother would sing to her baby. My mother is not a professional singer, but she loved to sing and knew a lot of songs! There is a particular tradition of singing to children in our country, much stronger, I would say, than one sees any more in the West. It was really important that in each family these songs would be handed down, taught to the children."

Kožená grew up in Brno, where Janáček lived, and she feels that “although he wasn't born there, it's so connected to him as a person that one can feel his presence. Some of these little folk melodies that he arranged, they are really extremely simple. But even the tiny things he did with them immediately make them a personal statement. You can hear it's by him straight away. These songs must have been enormously important to him. He used so many of the motifs in his operas later; they were a huge source of inspiration. I really regret that he didn't write more operatic roles for the mezzo voice! But he needed that extra strength of the dramatic soprano, impulsive and emotional, to achieve the big range."

In folk music there doesn't have to be one sort of voice, though; any can adapt. Not every listener might immediately recognize the voice on the very first, unaccompanied, track as being Kožená's. “No," she says, “maybe not. I wanted to do one song in this style. It's the way people would sing in wine cellars, maybe with a slightly rougher edge. The voices are quite differently trained, or untrained. I wanted to do this, not just for fun, but also to establish the folkloric mood that runs through this whole recording."

Spending so much time, as she does, singing in French, German or Italian, is it a relaxing treat to return to the Czech language? “Of course," she says, “your own language is always the most comfortable to sing in. There's no language coach standing beside you in rehearsal, telling you you're pronouncing it incorrectly. Then again, in your own language, you can always get the best colours in the voice. Many of the songs I have recorded here have been with me for a long time. Wherever I go, I include some of them in recitals. They are in my blood - when I sing them, it's not like working."

Speaking of the background to this recital inspired by Czech folk melodies and poetry, Kožená explains: “In Moravia there are scores, maybe hundreds, of different dialects. Every village, practically, has its own dialect. People hearing it for the first time, even if they know Czech, won't understand a lot of it. This is all part of the folkloric tradition. There is a great pride in each region, in the language itself." As a child, Kožená remembers often going to the village festivals, where there would be gatherings with everyone in traditional costume “and taking great pleasure in tasting wine in the cellars. The musicians would come, playing in the gypsy style on violin and cimbalom, and people would drink and sing. That was always very nice."

One Czech song is more famous than all the others, Dvořák's “Songs My Mother Taught Me". Why should this be? “It's hard to say. The melody is very catchy - that helps. He set and published it first in German, and it caught on very fast. It made such a good violin arrangement, too." There is continuity at work here as well, for Dvořák, Janáček and Martinř all knew one another, and later the tradition passed to Novák, Schulhoff and Eben. Kožená says: “I sang Martinů right from the start as a student; there are so many of his songs that are good for that learning process. They are maybe deceptively simple; the vocal line is often very easy. I included some of them at my very first recital. The later composers are much more sophisticated in their approach to the folk melodies, in the way they use them; but the melodies are still there, still important."
The oldest music here is by the early 19th-century composer Jan Josef Rösler. “Much of his music is in the tradition of German opera and Singspiel. I wanted to include this, because it's such a jewel."

The oldest texts are those used by Petr Eben for his cycle accompanied by guitar. “He was a very religious person, and I think you can hear that spirituality in his music. I love this cycle. One can say that this is absolutely modern music, but then he wanted to use this medieval poetry and give it to us through his own eyes and ears. I sang his music even as a student. He is a really important composer for the Czech people. His songs are very well written, and the choice of poetry is always fascinating."

Schulhoff, who died in a German concentration camp, makes perhaps the most sophisticated use of Czech themes in his Folksongs and Dances from Těšín (Czech Silesia) of 1936. A pupil of Debussy, he was also one of the earliest Czech composers to take jazz seriously and incorporate its influence into his symphonic work. “In these folksong arrangements, which are often very witty, I can hear a certain kind of hope, even though the story of his later years was tragic", says Magdalena Kožená.

“A lot of Czech music is still very little known", the singer points out. “My idea in this recital was to bring together songs by all these very different composers in order to show its enormously wide range. There is a very big difference, say, between the simplicity of some of the Janáček and Martinů arrangements and the much more sophisticated style of Novák, but even in those songs I can hear something very Czech, very close to all of us."